Anti-Materiel Rifle Kit XM42A

Changelog

🆑 sg2002

rscadd: Added a new anti-material rifle for the USCM, the XM42A, available in a common kit. It's terrible for any combat use, but destroys pylons in 3 shots, fortified walls and doors in 2 and anything other xeno defenses in 1.

/🆑

Details

Ok, so I'm pulling a @Kaga here and this is my alternative pylon fix proposal.

Why pylons should not be removed

For the few days !2216 (merged) was tested, the game enjoyment already suffered greatly for both sides.

Xenos have two options now. They either move the hive core and watch their hive OBd. Which happened 3 times in 1 round. Alternatively they have to avoid any contacts in the colony and only engage in caves. Why would you fight 60 marines and risk getting CASed, when you can fight 60 marines only? The current marine meta is also particularly static due to techweb sentries and MGs spam. Xenos have a hard time fighting all of that already and having to somehow worry about CAS too at the same time makes it even worse.

During that test xenos had to mostly try and avoid the FOB fights completely, because pushing into upgraded sentries, MGs, APC and now the fire support is almost impossible.

For marines the game becomes rather simple, you set up your sentries and MGs, push the xenos away with fire support, then just out-attrition them.

So in the end, if pylons were to be removed completely we would see a repeat of the worst aspects of 2019 meta - xenos not gonna contest the colony at all, just sit in the hive, then maybe fight the first push off, then retreat to the hive again and repeat until marines are completely depleted.

That's what is going to happen on the classic cave system-based maps like LV and Big Red. I don't know what chances xenos would have on Trijent, Annex or Snow. Especially if hive core moving would get nerfed too, as requested in #668.

Some marine players already got a taste of that strategy, there was even a rather misguided report, people supporting which for some reason believe that sitting in the hive and waiting for marines to push after the deployment constitutes a metarush.

So yeah, that 2019 "cavehugging" word's gonna make a comeback.

So how do we fix pylons then?

I had this idea for months now. So how would a real military organization deal with something like pylons? Lore-wise those are resin mushrooms with resin being made by drones presumably. Also the solution should be ideally be low tech, since our setting is retro-futuristic. Well, anti-materiel rifles are an obvious choice. Especially considering we already kinda have them in the code.

Gameplay implications

So ideally we don't want to give marines free map control. But while unrestricted fire support exists, xenos would be forced into the caves just about every round. But we also don't want marines to have no way of assaulting xeno strong points. Which is currently sort of the case especially in some choke point-like situations.

This MR gives marines a tool that allows them to assault heavily fortified xeno areas. Since a guy armed with this rifle won't be able to do much and xenos would just keep rebuilding if the builers are there, you need multiple marines coordinating.

The XM42A operational doctrine against xenomorph fortified positions:

1. JTAC operator spots the pylon and reports the position to the squad.
2. Anti material rifleman finds the proper position to destroy the pylon and removes any walls on the way to it.
3. The whole squad provides fire support to suppress xenos from rebuilding.
4. After the pylon falls, fire support suppresses the remaining xenos.
5. The squad pushes into position to prevent enemy from retaking it.

Sometimes the enemy would use the terrain to their advantage and hide the pylons, so squad level flanking attacks on such positions are recommended.

Also this XM42A can be used defensively, to prevent the most blatant cases of combat walling.

You can also support flamer mains with it, or open doors to then flare inside using a flare gun

So how good is this thing?

It destroys hivelord walls in doors in 2 shots, pylons in 3 and any other xeno defenses in 2.

What about the direct combat use?

Forget it.

The stats are:

• 40 damage
• 30 penetration
• 0 falloff
• Can only be fired while wielded.
• Terrible delay between shots.
• The only scope is bundled S8.
• No IFF.
• 5 round magazine
• It takes about 01:40 to kill a base Ravager. That's one minute and forty seconds.

You can hopefully snipe a critted xeno once in a while, but that's about it.

Why the hell is this so shit?

Well, there's some lore behind it:

XM42A was procured by the USCM in 2174 with a rather lucrative contract awarded to the WY who in turn subcontracted some of the design work to Armat System. In 2175 there was a minor controversy within the corps over XM42A being underpowered, unreliable and finicky to maintain. In 2178 all of the procured XM42As were taken out combat use and placed in storage. The new USCMIS 8-24.2 regulations document dated October 2181 suddenly mandated 1 anti-materiel rifleman within each squad with no real explanation ever give to anyone.

I'm sold where do I get one?

This kit would be available in both squad preps and req. I was thinking of giving it to RTOs by default too as a joke, but haven't decided on it. When !1219 (merged) would get merged, I'll integrate it with that.

Boring stuff

Further development

There are a few things I don't like about this rifle currently.

Firstly the look. I've used the already existing XM42B sprite, and it's just too cool for how much of a joke this thing is. So if someone would make an uglier looking sprite for it, I'll be happy.

Secondly, the designation. We keep going using that Letter4X pattern and the current designation sort of implies that it's related to M42A, which is the sniper gun. And that's wrong because unlike the sniper rifle, this one is an old defective design procured due to corruption and suddenly pressed into service again for no goddamn reason... So if someone on the lore team comes up with a better fitting name, I'll be happy with that.

Thirdly, the sound. Currently it uses the anti-tank rifle sound which is just too cool. Need a much crappier one, but I couldn't select one.

It also may need some secondary sprites, like a mag sprite since it currently uses the sniper mag sprite and the kit sprite, since it's currently the JTAC.

If someone does a sprite for this, maybe we can allow under-barrel attachments, since having masterkey on this would be a peak wallslayer 9000 loadout and miniflamer should be a fun option too.

But all of this is secondary, in the current state this thing is ready for use and the mockery of the entire USCM.

Balance concerns

I think the current state is ok, but I'm open to suggestions. Maybe a bit too good at it's role and some tweaks would be needed. Ammo is limited enough, since the req is dry currently. Maybe the number of rifles should be tweaked to make them rarer, but I wanted to give everyone a chance to enjoy it for now.

In terms of combat performance it can be buffed to a reasonable state too. Originally I planned this as a snowflake version of L42, but since there was already an anti-materiel kind of rifle in the code, I based mine on it. But since giving ungas extra 125 damage rifles would be OP, I had to nerf it to a reasonable state. If this gets accepted as a general idea I don't have a problem with rebasing this on L42 and giving it similar performance stats. You wanna waste that precious ammo, you do you.

The current scope is there for lore(and sprite) reasons, anti-materiel rifles exist, they have scopes. I'm open to limiting the effective range of this thing to something reasonable. Maybe the scope should be replaced with S2 or removed. And we can do whatever falloff is reasonable and even limiting the anti-materiel performance to visual range.

Technical side

I had add a new file to make damage boost work on the ammunition level. Thanks to @mekkiti for helping me debug that.

Related Issues

!2072 (closed) is something similar, only it gives a newer(not crap) version of this to the sniper spec. I wanted to allow ammo interoperability between mine and the current PMC anti-tank one, but definitely no interoperability between mine and Kaga's. Eventually someone would need to sit down and sort out that family of rifles, because it's getting messy.